Reuven Fenton and Anthony Blair report in the New York Post:
The head of a major Twin Cities police union slammed local officials for blocking cooperation between local cops and ICE and Border Patrol agents – saying if they had been involved, “there would be no loss of life.”
Say what? I haven’t seen anything about this in the Star Tribune:
St. Paul Police Federation President Mark Ross blamed state and local officials for the anti-ICE protest violence — saying that if highly trained cops were allowed to work with the feds, it likely would have prevented the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti…
“Had we been allowed just a little bit of coordination – not in terms of what ICE is doing, but if they say, ‘Hey, we need to go to this place to serve a warrant, we’re going to be out there a couple hours. We’re nervous that crowds are going to form and give us trouble. Can you come out and help?’ That’s something we can easily coordinate with a little bit of notice, and sometimes with hardly any notice, we can get out there quickly,” Ross said.
Well, what’s the problem? Ross explained:
“Part of it is leadership, because the leadership in our cities doesn’t want us communicating with the federal folks. And that disconnect has created some problems for everybody, and we’re stuck in the middle of it, and public safety is everybody’s responsibility,” he said.
“We want to be out there. We want to be keeping people safe, and it’s been really tough. We really feel like we’re in the middle of this, obviously, not by choice,” Ross added.
The Post headlines this story “Minnesota cops beg Walz, pols to let them work with ICE, say they could have prevented shootings.” I’d say that’s newsworthy. For some reason, however, I can’t find any mention of Ross or any reference to his observations in the Star Tribune.
Via James Freeman’s Wall Street Journal Best of the Web column “Minnesota politicians and consequences” (behind the Journal’s paywall).
